Journal of Porous Media

AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF INTERACTION BETWEEN NANOPARTICLES' DEPOSITION ON A SINTERED POROUS MEDIUM AND MIGRATORY FINES

Milad AhmadiInstitute of Petroleum Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Ali HabibiInstitute of Petroleum Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Peyman PourafsharyInstitute of Petroleum Engineering, School of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, IPE, North Kargar, Tehran, Iran

Shahab AyatollahiDepartment of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

ABSTRACT

One concern of oil production in sandstone reservoirs is fines migration. The migratory fines could plug throats and decline oil production; hence, introducing some methods for fines fixation could improve production from wells and reduce formation damage. One possible approach is injection of nanofluid near the wellbore to propagate into the drainage area zone and fix the fines. Nanofluid contains nanoparticles (NPs) which have special unique characteristics such as small size, high specific surface area, and high ability for adsorption. In this study, a sintered and consolidated porous medium was employed to study the influence of nanoparticles on fines migration. For this purpose, porous media were coated with nanoparticles with two different methods and the efficiency of fines fixation by each method and different nanoparticles was calculated and compared. In addition to the experiments, zeta potential measurements were performed to show the effect of nanoparticles on the surface forces in porous media. Based on our experiments and zeta potential measurements, we observe that magnesia nanoparticles could be an appropriate candidate to reduce the problem of fines migration. Magnesia nanoparticles could considerably reduce fines migration and simultaneously affect permeability reduction less than an uncoated state.